Book of Souls

His son did not subscribe to this kind of filial respect and obligation. He was a child of the times, his head turned by the trappings of Elizabethan modernity-dandyish clothes, frivolous music, theater troupes, and a far-too-cavalier approach to the serious business of God and religion. As far as Edgar was concerned, his son had more respect for a jug of wine or a lass’s rump than his father’s desires. If only Richard were the eldest, he would not have so dreaded the state of his legacy.

His legacy, he felt, was especially worthy of protection because he had labored so assiduously his entire life for Crown, for country and for Cantwell, and he was not about to blithely hand over his hard-acquired influence to a drunken fool. Thrust into baronial responsibilities immediately upon the untimely death of his father, he had begun a career as a public man who was forced carefully to navigate the treacherous waters of state politics.

When he returned to England in 1532, King Henry had already, unbeknownst to Edgar and indeed most of his subjects, secretly married Anne Boleyn, and thus begun his great conflict with Rome, seeking an annulment of his first marriage to Catherine. These were busy days for Edgar, who committed himself to taking charge of his estate, building his private chapel, his miniature Notre Dame, as a tribute to his murdered father, assuming a position befitting his legal education on the Council of the Marches, and finding a suitable wife.

The breaking of the chains that bound England to Rome occurred little by little, a succession of political moves and countermoves that culminated in Edgar’s first great crisis when, in 1534, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy making it high treason to refuse to swear that Henry was the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England.

Edgar pledged his affirmation especially quickly because he was aware of rumblings at Court about the papist shrine he was erecting at Wroxall. He was a good Catholic, to be sure, but his years at Paris, his friendship with Jean Calvin, and his secret knowledge of the certainty of predestination made him sufficiently “protestant” to convince himself he was not condemning his soul to damnation and hellfire by siding with the king in his Great Matter.

King Henry prodded Cromwell, and Cromwell prodded Parliament, and link by link the chain between England and Rome was separated until it was done in 1536. The Act Against the Pope’s Authority drove the last nail into the coffin. England was the Reformer’s country now.

Edgar married Katherine Peake, a homely woman from a substantial family, but she died in stillborn childbirth and left him a childless widower. He threw himself into his work and became in succession a judge at the Quarter Sessions Court, then the Great Sessions Court, where he rose to chief judge. To a degree, his fortunes swelled and deflated with the rise and fall of King Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, since the Seymour family had blood connections to the Cantwells. But when her son, Edward, ascended to the Crown in 1547 and Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, became Lord Protector, Edgar was blissfully elevated to the House of Lords and the Privy Council.

King Edward’s Reformation was harsher than his father’s, and all vestiges of the Papacy were purged from the countryside. The business of dismantling Catholic churches was completed in an orgy of shattered stained glass, broken statues, and burned vestments. The clergy were released from celibacy, processions were banned, ashes and palms were prohibited, stone altars were replaced by wooden communion tables. Edgar’s friend Calvin, in far-off Geneva, was exerting a profound influence on the English Isles. Edgar’s tiny Notre Dame chapel survived the tumult only because it was on private land, and he was a powerful and discreet noble.

For a time, the pendulum swung in the other direction when Queen Mary succeeded her brother and reigned for five brief years. Mary zealously sought to restore the Catholic faith. So it was Protestant men who were being seized and burned at the stake. Edgar deftly rediscovered his papist roots, marrying his second wife, Juliana, who hailed from a Stratford-upon-Avon family of closeted Catholics. Juliana, almost fifteen years his junior, began to bear him children, and his two daughters were ushered into the world as Catholics.

Then the pendulum moved once again. In 1558, Mary was dead, her sister, Elizabeth became queen and England once again became a Protestant reign. Edgar shrugged it off and became Protestant again, closing his ears to the entreaties of his wife, who nevertheless, continued to take secret mass in their chapel and educate her daughters with the Latin Bible. Though advanced in years, he finally sired a son whom his wife baptized, John, in a clandestine Catholic ceremony. Five years later, Richard was born, and Juliana’s life was lost amidst Edgar’s salty tears.